Category Archives: Just askin.’

“The ‘Victory Memo’ Is the ‘Ugliest’ Document in Climate Denial History” – NOT

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In my (technically) Part 1 post about the United Nations seemingly channeling the worthless 1998 “victory will be achieved” memo set almost as though someone at the UN was making an inside joke about the memo, I emphasized at the outset how that memo was no more than the second-best ‘evidence’ the collective enviro-activists mob has ever for their accusations about the fossil fuel industry orchestrating efforts to deceive the public about the ‘harm’ of global warming. It’s amazing how that mob made a mountain out of a mole hill over what was nothing more than a single-day workshop effort to propose efforts on informing the public about faulty angles of the push to get the Kyoto Treaty ratified in the U.S. Senate. When the people behind the memo effort finally fully realized the Kyoto Treaty was never going to be ratified, it became a stillborn effort. Period, end of story. Nothing came of it.

Yet here we are today, approaching 28 years later after the ‘big media splash’ about the memo set, and particular people are promulgating that set like it is the #1 be-all, end-all smoking gun evidence to indict the industry of treacherous deception. As in, what I was hinting about at the end of my Part 1 post. The promulgator has once again offered up his head on a silver platter to the defendant law firms representing the energy companies named in the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits across the U.S. – and potentially to the defendants in the (still M.I.A.) UK-filed Casquejo v Shell lawsuit. Continue reading →

Oreskes’ Embrace of the “Victory Will Be Achieved” Memos, Redux, in Honolulu v Sunoco – Big, big mistake.

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The widely shared Associated Press news on July 28th was that a hearing in Hawaii was scheduled to take place the next day on whether the Honolulu v Sunoco global warming damages lawsuit should be tossed out because the ‘statute of limitations’ on the case had somehow run out. The defendants’ law firms legal technicality minutiae maneuvers from all their prior 8+ months of effort to get it out of state court and into Federal court didn’t work, so it appears they are trying a different maneuver … but in ABC News’ July 28 regurgitation of the AP story, which I fortuitously screencaptured on July 29th, showed how Naomi Oreskes’ name just could not stay out of the overall situation. I say “fortuitous” because one day later when I reopened both the ABC “Honolulu’s lawsuit against fossil fuel companies leads climate change legal fight” story and the AP original version to copy words out of them – poof – Oreskes has vanished from both. But what’s seen in the internet cannot be unseen. What’s going on right there with that erasure? Luckily, someone smarter than me preserved an Internet Archive version of the original AP story, with the two Oreskes paragraphs intact.

Not an especially bright idea for the AP to say Oreskes had submitted an Opposition filing against the defendants’ ‘statute of limitations’ maneuver; dumber yet is to bury that fact like it never happened. However, that’s only the tip of the proverbial iceberg in this particular new situation. Continue reading →

Oops, a detail I missed in my 2020 dissection of D.C. v ExxonMobil

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What I missed doesn’t help the folks pushing these “ExxonKnew” lawsuits right now at all. I did not miss this same detail in my Nov 2024 dissection of Maine v BP. The problem in D.C. v Exxon compounds the apparent law firm ‘plagiarizing’ situation I detailed in that dissection. Continue reading →

Naomi Oreskes has a Socci Problem

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The public loves a tale of personal heroism. What kills a person’s hero story is when someone interrupts the tale and asks a point-blank question, “How is it possible that the thing you just described happened the way it did? It doesn’t seem to be readily obvious.” The storyteller can either dig their way out of the hole they just opened up, or not, and if that killer problem is left dangling in mid air for everyone to see, it’s an open invite to see what else in the tale falls apart.

Naomi Oreskes’ tale of personal heroism is not a tightly-knit fabric, it has loose ends everywhere. It’s hard to tell what level of intellect she has, but if she has any smarts at all, she should be petrified that if various major Federal / legal system investigators pull on any one of her loose threads, they’ll end up pointing a virtual gun in her face to explain her collective role in the climate issue. One way for it to all unravel is for an investigator to ask – who’d already know the answer – “Who is Anthony Socci?” Continue reading →

List of the Climate Lawsuits Falsely Accusing Dr Willie Soon of Taking Exxon Bribes

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This list will be an ongoing compilation, with updates noted in red, similar to my list of global warming lawsuits. Additions to this list will be ref’d in this top paragraph. – 1/24/26, added #39, Michigan v BP P.L.C.

In a bit of wishful thinking, the hugely suspect Center for Climate Integrity (CCI) gloated in its December 19, 2024 ‘News & Analysis’ piece that more than “one in four Americans now live in a community suing Big Oil, underscoring the rapidly growing wave of calls to hold the oil and gas industry accountable for its decades-long climate deception…”

The reality of the situation is that CCI itself is noted by both the Climate Litigation Watch website and the Energy in Depth website as apparently one of the main drivers pushing any gullible state / city / municipality leader in America to consider filing an “ExxonKnew” lawsuit. I’ve shown here at GelbspanFiles that CCI trumpeted their mid summer 2023 hiring of Roland C “Kert” Davies as their Director of Special Investigations, and within my tag category of major mentions of him, that he has direct associations with the four main elements of the central accusations in nearly all of these lawsuits. I’ve further suggested that since every one of the 35 current “ExxonKnew” lawsuits is enslaved to at least one if not all four elements, that we do not actually have any such “growing wave” of lawsuits, we instead have the same basic template — call it the “John Passacantando, Kert Davies, et al. [dba Greenpeace USA née Ozone Action / Our Next Economy / CIC ] v. Exxon & any other applicable energy companies” template, for lack of a better description — being repeated ad nauseam.

The main law firm pushing these lawsuits is already under investigation by the U.S. House and Senate. With new Senate GOP majority rule and the power to subpoena witnesses and demand they produce particular documents, these investigations are going to need bulletproof backup material to proceed. Since the entire accusation surrounding Dr Soon as it pertains to accusations in these lawsuits has every appearance of originating from just two individuals – Passacantando and Davies, who both also appear to be participants in efforts to portray Exxon as a corrupt organization – it would be handy to have a list of how far and wide their accusations have been spread into the main law firm’s filings, and into the filings by others who’ve apparently plagiarized the accusations.  Continue reading →

The Al Gore Problem just got one increment larger: “The Climate According to A.I. Al Gore.”

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If you are a nationally or internationally recognized hero / heroine who’s exposing a crisis situation caused by bad operators that not enough of the public is aware of, and you decide to tel the story of what specific event led you onto your current heroic path, that event had better not be something which somebody will say, “wait a minute, that is not the way it actually happened.” Because if someone does, and presents compelling enough evidence which totally undermines your oft-repeated narratives about what inspired you to do what you do, increasing amounts of people who trusted you are going to wonder what else you’ve said are embellishments or outright fabrications designed to make you look heroic.

Such is the major problem presented in Joel Gilbert’s ‘unauthorized bio-pic “The Climate According to A.I. Al Gore.” (available now for DVD or live streaming purchase). The setup is elemental: Al Gore himself does not like questions from anyone he suspects is an unfriendly interviewer, so filmmaker director Gilbert’s opted to ask an A.I. version of Gore to tell his life story and then to answer some tough questions about the climate issue angle of his saga. But that’s not all —this film reveals a huge legacy-crippling problem in Gore’s longtime ‘hero’ story he tells concerning what exactly propelled him into the climate issue. At GelbspanFiles, I’ve detailed the legacy-crippling problems of the others who’ve told heroic tales of how they got into the issue, along with briefly mentioning a key problem with Gore’s outrage against industry entities that allegedly sought to “reposition global warming as theory.” What follows below is how these ‘hero/heroine’ stories all seem to dovetail together in a much more troubling manner now. Continue reading →

California v Exxon v.2 — the plastics waste/pollution crisis lawsuit’s “Chicken Little” problem

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There’s some irony to California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s 9/23/24 lawsuit speaking of “the plastic waste and pollution crisis” while only mentioning the other ‘crisis du jour’ “climate change” four times (the first instance is actually just a reference to a Canadian organization’s name). The lawsuit makes no comparison to alleged deception by the fossil fuel industry over their ‘knowledge’ of the harm of human-induced global warming. So, what possible connection(s) could there be to the efforts to smear skeptic climate scientists as ‘shills’ working for Exxon? Allow me to illustrate. Be sure to click on each link, the screencapture images will set up the big problem for AG Bonta.  Continue reading →

Summary for Policymakers: Naomi Oreskes

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This list will have occasional additions, ref’d in this top paragraph – 7/29/25, her false accusation about the API “victory will be achieved” memos” added as Item #12.

If you say another person is a liar and can’t keep their personal stories straight, no matter what the topic is, you can’t hurl this as a drive-by shot, you must extensively prove it, because your own reputation now depends on it. People might regret demanding proof if it then sends them into extensive reading, but that’s the price they pay to become fully informed. If they dismiss the mountain of evidence as “too deep into the weeds,” individuals like “Merchants of Doubt” documentary movie star/book author Naomi Oreskes pray for this kind of dismissal — ceding the moral high ground to her.

So, first, a brief number lineup, followed by more details for each, with screencapture image links to back up my specific points, and blog post links which back up what I point out in deep detail:

1. Oreskes’ science consensus  2. Ties to Al Gore  3. False accusation about the “reposition global warming memos”  4. Fatal problems with her “Merchants of Doubt” documentary  5. Her two mutually exclusive ‘discovery’ of who the doubt merchants were  6. Oreskes – the communist .. or something  7. Why would lawyers hire her?  8. Her clumsy amici curiae efforts & global warming/cooling inconsistency  9. The Fred Singer email chain problem  10. The 3 little words she omitted from LBJ’s 1965 speech  11.  RICO-Teering, Oreskes-Style  12. Oreskes’ embrace of the accusation about the never-implemented “victory will be achieved” memos
Continue reading →

I Stand Corrected — and it doesn’t benefit the ‘corrupt skeptic climate scientists’ accusers at all

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The setup here is elemental. In the movie companion book for Al Gore’s 2006 “An Inconvenient Truth,” he said outright that the namesake of my blog, Ross Gelbspan, had discovered the notorious ‘leaked fossil fuel industry memo’ “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact,” one page in an extended set attributed to a coal industry public relations campaign which allegedly had sinisterly targeted (Gelbspan’s words, in a 1997 radio show interview) their ‘disinformation’ very narrowly at “older, less-educated men” and “young, low-income women.” It turns out that the PR campaign never operated under a directive to ‘reposition’ anything, and in one obscure instance, Gelbspan himself revealed that an official of the PR campaign said their climate issue information was directed at everyone within their audience.

On many occasions here at GelbspanFiles when I’ve said Al Gore’s story doesn’t line up right (e.g. the screencapture example below) about Gelbspan’s ‘discovery,’ I’ve pointed out that Gelbpsan’s earliest-seen quotes of those memo set phrases trace back as early as his December 5th, 1995 National Public Radio interview.

I’m not wrong at all about Gore quoting the never-implemented audience targeting phrases from that memo set years before Gelbspan ever said a word about them. The unanswered problem remains: how could Gelbspan discover memos which Gore already had? What I need to correct is when Gelbspan’s earliest mention of those phrases happened. Continue reading →

Why Would the NY AG Office Care about a Particular Movie Trailer Video?

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The Nov 29, 2023 “Amicus Brief Details Climate Litigation Campaign’s Political Origins” at the Climate Litigation Watch website described the situation surrounding the most recent release of docs out of the New York Attorney General’s office that were demanded by the Government Accountability & Oversight (GAO) watchdog group. The docs – 129 pages of emails – surround Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF)’s Lee Wasserman lobbying the NY AG office to launch basically an “ExxonKnew”-style lawsuit holding fossil fuel producers accountable for causing global warming, where among other efforts, Wasserman arranged a meeting at the AG office for ex-Ozone Action / ex-Greenpeacers John Passacantando and Roland “Kert” Davies. The teaser from Wasserman to the attorneys was that the duo were about to launch a supposedly devastating news event in which skeptic climate scientist Dr Willie Soon would be portrayed as an oil industry shill.

Among the (redundantly copied in some cases) Wasserman/ AG office email exchanges were several in which the correspondents were trying to locate a person named David Brown, who somehow factored into all the efforts. RFF Director Lee Wasserman thought this was a great idea. It turns out he was formerly the head of prior-NY AG Elliot Spitzer’s Investment Protection Bureau office, and ultimately, he was located and had a phone conversation with at least one of the attorneys. The potential problem here is how he later chimed in via email with a seemingly out-of-the-blue reference to a “movie trailer” link, which he must have mentioned in the phone conversation. Why mention that among efforts to nail ‘Big Oil’ to the wall? Well, click on the link the fellow provided, and you’ll see a hint of how that factors in:

“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8ii9zGFDtc”

There’s more, of course. There always is. Continue reading →